I turn a certain age this year, and to celebrate, I’m going to go away with a friend and do some camping and hiking at a nearby Very Famous Mountain Lake. While some might use this kind of expedition to do personal reflection on the state of one’s life, I expect I’ll while away my hours away from the routine to drink too much, eat all the wrong foods, forget I ever knew how to use a computer, and read a thoroughly trashy novel.

But first, I must pick through my camping gear, figuring out what to take and what to leave. Since we’re car-camping, I can haul our old Coleman stove, which we received as a wedding gift (Thanks, M.A.!), lo, these many years ago, which still does a marvelous job and is built like a tank. But sometimes you just want to boil up a bit of water for a cocoa, or haul cooking gear on the trail for a cup of soup at lunchtime on a cold day. No tank needed.

That’s where the Jetboil comes in. This is a camp stove that’s remarkably efficient and lightweight. According to the company, you can boil two cups of water in two minutes, which is twice as fast and uses half as much fuel as conventional stoves. Plus, it weighs less than a pound. One micro-canister can boil up to 50 cups of water.

The inner-fixins’ involve some kind of patent-pending heat exchanger that — with laser-like efficiency — focuses the heat on the water you want to boil.

The same technology is now being used to create other utensils — such as the Jetboil 3.0 Liter Helios Fluxring Cooking Pot.

The one aspect of the coming week that I dread actually has nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with sleeping. I tend to get very cold when I sleep on the ground — so cold that my teeth chatter, my body shivers, and my skin turns somewhat blue. So I’m rather hoping to hear that Jetboil has got a new kind of sleeping bag in the works. I’ll be the first in line for that kind of heat exchanger.

Posted on September 28th, 2008 by dian